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su hangs

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xenia123

Technical User
Dec 6, 2005
25
SE
hi all,

I've got a problem with su on Solaris 9. If I make a su, the Server hangs.. i can't do anything, but the server is still running. I have also an earlier problem, that there's an empty /var/adm/messages file since months.. I have no idea what I can do without root permissions.. Can somebody help me please?

Thank you in forward

greetings,
xenia123
 
The server hangs? Or your session does? i.e. if you log in to another session, can you still do stuff?

Does it prompt you for a password before hanging?

What output does which su give?

Annihilannic.
 
just the session hangs. it prompts me for the password after that, nothing happens after tiping the password. su is located in /usr/bin/su
 
Is there anything on the console when this happens? Who's the system administrator with root access?
 
Is there anything in the su'ing user's .profile that might be causing the hanging?
 
im the system administrator with root access.. i logged in as root over the console via a terminalserver and then tried to make a su on an other user.. the session still hangs.. but it is possible to attach a terminal.. would that be useful? i could kill the opened session. But where's the problem? could it be that there are metters with sulog?
 
Possibly. What are the permissions on sulog? They should be 600, owned by root:root.
 
no i can't see anithing in the .profile file which might be causing the hanging.. ive tried it with local and ldap users, but everytime the same problem :(
 
Is syslogd running? Try restarting it perhaps?

[tt]/etc/init.d/syslog stop
/etc/init.d/syslog start[/tt]

Even so, I don't think that would cause su to hang.

Also make sure that /var isn't full... probably obvious, but...!

As root, try truss -f su - someuser and see if it gives you a clue about where exactly it is hanging.

Annihilannic.
 

the permissions are set to 600 and owner group are root.

im going to kill the opened sessions over the terminal and then make as root a truss. /var is not full, the capacity is 26%.

another problem is, that the messages file is empty, there's nothing in it..
 
If you type logger -p daemon.notice "This is a test" does it appear in /var/adm/messages?

The messages file being empty is not necessarily a bad thing... if there's nothing wrong on your system and nothing much going on that is quite normal, but rare.

Annihilannic.
 
hello Annihilannic

Thank you for your help :) I found the problem. Before some months an other system administrator run jass. And this had modified the /etc/syslog.conf File. Maybe the hanging with su could also in cause of jass..
Now, everything works fine and I hope it will;)
There are a lot of error messages in the messages file :S but it still works :D

thanks and regards
xenia123
 
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